


Lovely, Dark

by Arya_Greenleaf



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Force Bond (Star Wars), Kissing, M/M, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 09:54:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8139763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arya_Greenleaf/pseuds/Arya_Greenleaf
Summary: At any other time, Hux would have been concerned waking to the darkness and silence of space encroaching upon his quarters--but it is warm and there is smooth chersilk under his fingertips and though his mind refuses to quiet, Ren is there, so changed but there in his arms.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A birthday gift for the ever-wonderful [noxogoth](noxogoth.tumblr.com).
> 
> I do so hope you enjoy it and that there is sufficient nose-touching and softness therein. <3

The room is silent and still.

The ship-sounds have faded into white noise and then into nothing at all.

The air vents have ceased to hum. The occasional flow of reclaimed water through the bulkhead has frozen in the piping. The engines, their thrumming an ever-present comfort through the vast nothingness of the galaxy, seem to have stopped functioning.

In any other moment, Hux would have been concerned.

The darkness all around is tangible.

It is velvety soft against his skin and he is a bright, white light breaking through it. The darkness is all-encompassing—pulsing around his fingers and toes, stroking up his arms and legs toward his core, caressing his cheeks, fluttering against his eyelids like a lover’s lips.

The darkness of the room, inky black and consuming the light of him even as he radiates, is warm—so unlike the starless void outside his viewport.

The void contained instead within the room is a gentle thing, lacking the teeth of space—the cold airlessness, the lethal vacuum.

It is as if the _Finalizer_ has evaporated, slipped through the fabric of reality and Hux is becoming a part of the void. It is almost pleasant in its nothingness.

Against his bare skin, Hux feels waxed hypercloth in stiff ridges and folds and chersilk as smooth as molten silver. He senses the weight of a body against his, something materializing out of the void like the warmth and darkness and silence have become sentient and taken on solid shape.

There is leather worn soft and thin, the scent of it clean and earthy through the overwhelmingly sharp zing of ozone that settles over Hux with the heft of the dark-turned-being. The leather spreads and separates into digits that glide over his shoulders to follow the ridges of his collarbones toward his throat. Hands close around it, a grounding tension and a delicate touch. Thumbs press in under his jaw and trace the outlines of his face, settling on lips that Hux purses in response.

The chersilk surcoat is not a usual fixture. It’s a new sensation, a new layer, something Hux longs to see in the light—too exquisite for the form it covers. He reaches out in the dark and runs his fingertips over the chersilk, feeling the solidity of chest and arms beneath. He follows the line of the high collar over the swooping taper of shoulder and neck until he feels cool metal, instinctively manipulating the releases on either side, just below the ears and behind the jaw.

The masks opens with a soft hiss, the click of well-crafted gears, and Hux lifts it away. He knows that somewhere in the void that it has rolled over the edge of the mattress and hit the floor even if he cannot see or hear it. He gropes blindly, the familiar topography of Kylo Ren’s face sprawling under Hux’s fingertips—the twisted mass of scar tissue running from hairline to jaw a bewildering mountain ridge sprung up through the smooth rolling plains of it. Ren’s sharp intake of breath cuts through the silence, echoing off of the undefined walls of it and vibrating through Hux’s brain, amplifying.

Questions spring up in his head, formed and unformed, coherent and rambling. He wants to ask them all at once, demand answers. Suddenly his mind clears like swiping a hand across a holodisplay waiting for some protocol sequence to be entered. Ren’s face is pressing in close to his, the slide of nose-against-nose almost too much and too real. Hux cards his fingers though Ren’s hair—much longer than he remembered—and holds him still when he begins to pull away.

Hux parts his lips against the leather-clad fingertips to speak and finds that all the air has left the room. Instead, he turns his face, placing small kisses at the corner of Ren’s wide mouth, eyelashes brushing against the apple of Ren’s cheek and making him perceptibly shiver.

_You’re here,_ he thinks, projecting it loud and clear through the void. _You’re back—truly?_

Words form and crumble against the surface of Hux’s thoughts and Ren is pulling Hux toward himself. The toe of his boot scrapes against Hux’s shin. Arms circle his waist and coax him onto his side—they tuck him into the shelter of Ren’s sheer mass and gloved hands run up and down his back, feeling each notch of his spine and the projections of his shoulder blades. The urgency of it is unsettling.

A finger curls under Hux’s chin, tipping his face upward and Ren is kissing him. It is gentle and hard and too fast and it makes is head spin as his mind floods with the bright red light of _Starkiller_ and his eyelids become a holoscreen as he watches Hosnian Prime become a pocket nova and explode in a shower of ash and rock. The blinding light of the superweapon becomes the terrifying glow of Ren’s saber far too close to Hux’s face. He knows that it’s only a vision, and yet the crackling of the plasma blade is so loud he thinks it might really be there just inches from his nose.

Hux tenses as the red glow darkens and pulls together into a round drop, falling toward snow that looks blue in the twilight of the dying sun. His fingers tighten into fists and he rubs his face against Ren’s, the rope of scar-tissue dragging against his skin. _Ren, stop,_ he pleads. _Please stop, I don’t want—_

In his mind’s eye, Ren’s eyes are falling into slits and his lips are bloodless and pale and he is lying in the melting snow with the ground rumbling beneath him—threatening to swallow him the way the darkness and silence and warmth are swallowing them now. Hux hears his own voice, high and reedy with distress, calling out for the troopers that are following him to get Ren off of the ground.

The darkness is all-encompassing. It is a weight against Hux’s chest that won’t allow him to fill his lungs.

_Ren—_

The velvet-soft warmth of the darkness has been sucked out of the room and Ren is pulling Hux closer still, as if trying to subsume Hux’s body into his own. The waxed hypercloth sleeves of Ren’s robes are rough against his back and the chersilk is smooth and liquidy against his chest and Ren’s body is tense and tight and a heavy leg is falling over Hux’s hip.

_Ren—_

There is a soft yellow glow dancing against the holoscreen of Hux’s eyes. It is growing steadily brighter even as the temperature drops and gooseflesh raises on his limbs. Ren is in his head, pale and bruised and inflamed and his eyes and flying open and he is gasping for breath. Hux has a sense of someone hovering nearby, too close, and the light is blocked by an amorphous shape. Ren is struggling to stand and the shape focuses, sharpening into silhouettes and the Knights of Ren are at once a comfort and a threat.

_Kylo—_

Hux is kissing him and stroking his hair and face and shoulders as images flutter through his head—bodies corded with muscle and scars, the flash and crackle of plasma blades, the agonizing sounds of grinding and crunching bone, the soft touches of hands both bare and gloves and the shadowy ill-formed faces of the Knights as they hover. Ren is moving, power flowing through his body as hand and foot thrash out against opponents and hi light saber cuts through whatever is thrown in its path like a warm knife through butter.

Hux cranes his neck to press his lips to each of Ren’s eyelids in turn, his heart hammering in his chest at the image of Snoke’s twisted face. The raw realness of it, the solidity of the image—not flickering and radiation damaged and far too large as projected by the holocom—is disgusting and terrifying. His stomach turns over in knots as a bony, twisted hand teaches out to _touch_ and a cool, leathery palm makes contact with the sweaty skin of Ren’s forehead.

_Kylo—_

Hux sobs, dry and sharp in the back of his throat and Ren is holding his saber out to some nameless man who feels like _home_ and _betrayal_ and _lies_ and _Light_ and the man is touching his face and falling into the chasm of the deepest structures of _Starkiller_. With the touch of Snoke’s hand something inside of Ren _burns_ and the Dark—the void—the silence—the icy warmth of it—is exploding out of him and his eyes are changing like blue milk swirling into caf and they are no longer the clear, bright golden-sepia that Hux knew but a frighteningly bloodshot yellow.

Hux presses his forehead to Ren’s and in the vision playing out Ren is robed in strong hypercloth and rich chersilk, dressed by the others of his kind in a manner both subservient and overly intimate.

All at once the void recedes, sucked not back into the toothsome clarity of space beyond the viewport but into Ren who is trembling with it like some long-extinct Alderaanian deer. The fear in him is heavy on Hux’s tongue, passed to him by Ren’s insistent lips.

The lights overhead are stinging Hux’s eyes as he opens them. He gasps, recoiling in surprise at the color of Ren’s eyes, truly changed, and the discoloration that leeches out across his face from the line of the scar. He notices now the small, fine braids that hold Ren’s hair away from his face and the tiny, shimmering ornamentation that binds the end of each. Hux has a sense of gentle hands in his own hair, the tug of a brush, the closeness of a body behind him.

“Hux,” Kylo says aloud.

The sound of the single syllable is overwhelming in the wake of the void. His jaws works, muscle and tendon rolling as he clenches it around unformed words. He squeezes his eyes shut and on his side as he is, a shining saline pool forms in the curve of his nose. Blinking rapidly and drawing in a shaking breath, he steadies himself. Hux wipes at the tears with his thumb, pretending the offensive display had never occurred, and kisses the moist swell of his cheek.

“I want to be free of this.”

Hux’s heart feels like it is slowing. His ears are ringing. A hazy vision fills his head—something yet to come, something hoped for or imagined—and Ren is yelling, a feral rage ripping through the haze, and Snoke is falling against his blade.

The void explodes, sucking in the bright, white light of Hux even as he radiates—the sheer mass of Kylo Ren’s body a confusion of soft and cold and hard and warm. There is hypercloth against the skin of his back and smooth chersilk under his fingertips.

“Kylo,” Hux whispers, surprised at the ability to form audible speech. “You will be. You’re _here._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I lied and it didn't turn out as soft as I intended. I hope you enjoyed it all the same.
> 
> [Find me on tumblr, over yonder.](avaahren.tumblr.com)


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